VINCENT GIGANTE

'Vincent "The Chin" Gigante' (March 29,1928 – December 19, 2005) was a New York Mafioso who headed the Genovese crime family for years, at times while in prison. Dubbed "the Oddfather," by the press in the mid-1960s, Gigante was regularly seen wandering the streets of Greenwich Village, Manhattan in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself.

Contents

Early life

Feigning legal insanity

Conviction and imprisonment

Death

Further reading

Footnotes

External links

Early life

Born in Manhattan, Gigante was one of five sons of Salvatore Esposito Vulgo Gigante, a watchmaker, and Yolanda Scotta, a seamstress, both immigrants from Naples, Italy.^[1] His mother usually addressed him as "Cincenzo," a diminutive of Vincenzo, but his boyhood friends shortened that name into "Chin." Gigante dropped out of Textile High School in Manhattan in the ninth grade and became a protégé of Vito Genovese. Between age 17 and 25, Gigante was arrested seven times, but received only one 60 day jail sentence for a gambling conviction.
Gigante claimed to be a tailor but was better known as a boxer, winning 21 of 25 light heavyweight bouts between age 16 and 19, according to Nat Fleischer's Ring Record Book. Club boxers in those days fought four- and six-round contests in neighborhood arenas, usually getting a percentage of the tickets they themselves sold. One of Gigante's managers was a Greenwich Village neighbor, Thomas (Nicholas Pasciuto) Eboli, who later became the boss of the Genovese family.
Gigante retired from boxing around 1946 and began working for the Genovese family. In 1957, Gigante allegedly participated in the assassination attempt on boss Frank Costello in his apartment building vestibule. Costello refused to identify Gigante as one of the gunmen, even though Costello's doorman identified Gigante as such. In 1958, Gigante was acquitted of attempted murder charges. In 1959 Gigante was imprisoned for dealing in heroin and paroled five years later.

Feigning legal insanity

In 1969, Gigante started feigning mental illness to escape criminal prosecution. He escaped conviction on bribery charges by producing a number of prominent psychiatrists who testified that he was legally insane. The doctors said Gigante suffered from schizophrenia, dementia, psychosis, and other disorders. Gigante allegedly enlisted his mother and wife to help him in these deceptions. In 1986, the official Genovese boss, Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, was convicted on charges of murder and racketeering and sentenced to 100 years in prison. However, former mobster and turncoat Vincent Cafaro soon revealed that Salerno was just a front boss, a figurehead; the real boss of the family since 1981 was Gigante.
Gigante brought his sons, Vincent Esposito and Andrew Gigante into the family. Vincent served as his messenger to the rest of the family and Andrew was given control of the waterfront operations. Gigante used a new structure to control the Genovese family.
The official boss, Gigante, would pass orders through a messenger, son Vincent, to the street boss. The street boss would then give orders to the underboss. The capos would answer to the messenger, street boss, or underboss, but never directly to the official boss. This was Gigante's way of keeping a low profile and making sure no one knew who he was.
In 1990, Gigante was arrested and charged with racketeering and murder; however, it wasn't until 1997 that he was brought to trial. During that time period, Gigante's lawyers produced witness after witness who testified that Gigante was mentally ill and unfit to stand trial. However, all this changed when a number of prominent Mafia members from various families began to cooperate with the government in the early 1990s.
Foremost among the cooperating witnesses was Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, former underboss of the Gambino crime family, who became a cooperating witness in 1991. Gravano testified that on the two occasions he met Gigante the mob boss was perfectly lucid and clear in his thinking. Other turncoat witnesses such as Phil Leonetti of the Bruno crime family of Philadelphia implicated Gigante in ordering a series of murders in the early 1980s of members of the Bruno family. Additionally, Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, former underboss of the Lucchese crime family, implicated Gigante in enlisting Casso to kill John Gotti, Frank DeCicco and Gene Gotti soon after Gotti became boss of the Gambino family in early 1986.

Conviction and imprisonment

In Summer 1997, Gigante was finally convicted on several racketeering, conspiracy, and related charges in the and sentenced to 12 years in a federal prison. Despite his lawyers' and psychiatrists' claims that he has been legally insane for more than 30 years, the jury convicted him on all but the murder charges, which would have mandated a life sentence without parole.
Gigante continued to run the crime family from his cell. Gigante sent messages through his son Vince to the street boss, who then relayed them to a Ruling Committee. In 2003, Gigante pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and finally admitted in court that his insanity claims were all false. He received a sentence of three years to be served after his current sentence was completed. He was due for release in 2010.

Death

In 2005, Gigante's health started to decline. He started suffering labored breathing, oxygen deprivation, swelling in the lower body, and bouts of unconsciousness. In November 2005, Flora Edwards, his lawyer, sued officials at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri to transfer Gigante to an acute care hospital. Transferred to a private medical facility, Gigante rallied physically. In early December, he was transferred back to Springfield, where he died 10 days later on December 19, 2005.
On December 23, 2005, after a service at Saint Anthony of Padua Church in Greenwich Village, Gigante's body was cremated at the historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. He is survived by eight children (five from his wife and three from his mistress) and his prominent cousins from Boston. (The cousins spell their name both Gigant'e' and Gigant'i'.) Gigante's lawyer has said that the family intends to sue the federal government over Gigante's health care treatment while in prison.

Further reading

★ Capeci, Jerry. ''The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia''. Indianapolis: Alpha Books, 2002. ISBN 0-02-864225-2

★ Jacobs, James B., Coleen Friel and Robert Radick. ''Gotham Unbound: How New York City Was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime''. New York: NYU Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8147-4247-5

★ Maas, Peter. ''Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia''. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997. ISBN 0-06-093096-9

★ Raab, Selwyn. ''Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires''. New York: St. Martin Press, 2005. ISBN 0-312-30094-8

Footnotes

1. http://www.wargs.com/other/gigante.html

External links

★ Mob boss admits insanity an act, pleads guilty Andy Newman, New York Times, April 8, 2003

★ Vincent "Chin" Gigante

★ Raab, Selwyn (December 19, 2005). Vincent Gigante, Organized Crime Leader Who Feigned Insanity, Dies at 77. [1] ''New York Times''.

★ American Organized Crime - Genovese Crime Family - Vincent "the Chin" Gigante